Ian Milligan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo.
Dr. Ian Milligan is at the forefront of the growing field of big data analytics in the humanities. Since joining the Department of History at the University of Waterloo in 2012, he has published two books: Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada(UBC Press, 2014) and Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (with Shawn Graham and Scott Weingart; Imperial College Press, 2015).
In addition to publishing numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, he has contributed to many mainstream publications, explaining the stakes and value of the digital humanities, history, open data, and web archiving on the CBC and to readers of Nature, The Canadian Parliamentary Review, and the Literary Review of Canada. He is a co-founder of ActiveHistory.ca, a website that demonstrates new modes of public engagement and knowledge mobilization.
Dr. Milligan is remarkably dedicated to community building: he has used a number of platforms to help others learn to work with digital cultural heritage. He has contributed four of The Programming Historian‘s lessons, has documented his research process to serve as tutorials on his personal website, and regularly leads workshops at conferences.
He has already proven himself a national leader in the field of digital history in Canada. With WebArchives.ca, he is paving the way in showing us how to recover and mine “lost” political web archives to study recent history. He is also one of the lead contributors to Warcbase, a web archive management tool that lowers barriers to web archive administration and data visualization.
He has shown extraordinary leadership in developing research infrastructure. He has led the proposal for and development of a Compute Canada Portal for Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK). This project brings together researchers and university libraries to aggregate and co-locate Canadian Internet Archive collections.
The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Societé canadienne des humanités numériques is honoured to recognize Dr. Ian Milligan as the recipient of the 2016 Outstanding Early Career Award.
